trying to animate a sine wave in a beam emitter, no dice.

pmiller001

Hey guys, 

I'm trying to make a laser in cascade using a sine wave I can animate over its life time. This is what i've got so far. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRUmc2PmiJc

 Getting the wave to animate inside of the material editor wasn't horribly difficult. but now I"m trying to make it so that I can animate the wobbliness over its lifetime using a dynamic parameter, but that doesn't seem to be working. Have any of you had experience with this problem? Or is this all user error ?
TO get the wobbliness in the first place i have a time node multiplied by a scalar parameter, and that works perfectly fine, I just wanted to be able to do that in cascade, 

PS: would it be appropriate to keep updating this thread with any more questions I have and renamingit, or shouldi make a new thread for each question? 

pmiller001

Hey guys, so i found this vdoe on controlling material parameters through blue prints. Going to see if this does the trick for me. I'll let you know if it works for me

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I8s-Bt-YOUg

Obscura

Use "Dynamic parameter" node. that can be used with curves in a particle

pmiller001

Hey @Obscura
I tried using a dynamic parameter, but it doesnt seem to work with a beam emitter. I was recommended to try using controling my scalar parameter through blue prints. 
Is that not the way to go? 
I"ll post my grraph when i get home tonight. 

Obscura

It is an option but not necessary a normal way. I'll try this out later, I think it should work.

pmiller001

So I figured out ONE WAY to solve my problem. I multiplied my red channel of my particle color by my time, so now i can change the "speed" of the sine wave by changing my color over life. It actually gets  me a pretty cool result, but no i have to figure out how to make it exactly the colors that I want haha. 
I was thinking I could use the Green channel as an alpha between for a lerp between  a color param, and another color? Although I'm not sure what that would do. I'm just writing this down now so I can remember what I want do do later. I'll post a video of what exactly I did tonight, as I'm sure what I typed doesn't exactly make a lick of sense 

pmiller001

SO i figured out what I needed to do with my laser. 

Originally my problem was I couldnt animate the amplitude and speed of the sine wave in the particle editor on the beam emitter. I tried plenty of things that didnt work. I ended up using the green channel in the particle emitter as the control for the amplitude. My thought process was, instead of controlling the color through the particle color, just use a color vector parameter. Then ANOTHER problem came up, in that, Now I couldnt animate the color like I wanted (make the laser hotter as its life goes on and then have it effectively turn off). From there I figured, well if I used the green channel for the amplitude I could use another channel fro something else. SO i ended up using the red channel from the particle color as an "alpha" between another Vector color parameter and the one I already had. That allowed me to use the Red channel in Color over life to blend between two colors. That being said, I still have to go into a material instance to change the color, but thats  a much bigger improvement over what I had before.Now I want to figure out how I can make those particles stop, and then add more effects to this . 

https://youtu.be/ZxqyKU4v2LA